As a counterpoint to "throwaway cars", when they don't need repairs they do seem to be able to do a million miles or more with comparitively little maintenance.
The throwaway effect can an does happen to any ICE vehicle easily, when the engine is not economic to repair. We should have laws covering all types and brands of vehicles to make them more repairable, but ultimately this should be easier with electric (recycling batteries in bulk is cheaper than mining more lithium)
> As a counterpoint to "throwaway cars", when they don't need repairs they do seem to be able to do a million miles or more with comparitively little maintenance.
It's just that the rest of the car is poor quality. That's fine if it's cheap and easy to fix, but it's not. You can't get the parts, you can't install the parts if you can get them because they have to be paired with the car, and, in general, they're like a lot of modern ICEs that fall apart around a running drivetrain. Except worse, because they're luxury cars and you can't even do the repair work yourself.
It's interesting reading your blog post, as there's essentially a lot of projection as to what life would be like for Tesla drivers post-warranty. It's now over four years since you wrote that post, it would be neat to see how it's turned out.
Unfortunately, I no longer work with enough Tesla owners to have a reasonable sample, and I've lost my tolerance for the Tesla corners of the internet years ago. Someone should talk to owners and do that, but it's hard to get straight out of Tesla owners since so many are personally invested in Tesla succeeding. "Yeah, it's been 100% reliable, they've replaced my drive unit twice, battery once, six door handles, a LCD screen, but it's all under good will NDA care, so... er, sorry, I can't actually tell you any of this."
Isn't that a function of being an EV rather than an ICE? I'd expect an EV from any of the traditional automakers to also require comparatively little maintenance.
That's why the auto industry is anticipating that leasing will eventually be the standard model. Nobody is going to want to pay half a new car's price just to have a new battery installed.
> As a counterpoint to "throwaway cars", when they don't need repairs they do seem to be able to do a million miles or more with comparitively little maintenance.
> One Tesla Model S Has Gone Nearly 1 Million Miles And Needed Some Major Repairs
> The owner, Hansjörg von Gemmingen-Hornberg says the car is on at least its third battery. The first was replaced under warranty at about 180,000 miles. The second was replaced after about 93,000 additional miles before the third battery was installed. So far, the Model S has done more than 621,000 miles on that third battery.
>That isn’t all. The car also needed four drive motors to reach over 900,000 miles. The P85 has only one drive motor on the real axle. That means three different drive motors have failed.
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An out of warranty battery replacement is 20k or so and drive motor replacement is about 10k, so I think it's safe to say we're talking about the equivalent cost in drivetrain replacements to what? 4 engines or 5 engines in an ICE? Assuming a rather expensive engine since the Model S is technically a luxury car?
Technically you can drag most modern ICEs (or any vehicle for that matter) along to a million miles, but different cars are more or less likely to make it without major issues.
Tesla is not who I'm expecting to make the most million mile worthy EV. EVs are not some magical land compared to every other product in existence: Chasing new hotness so ruthlessly you consider model years an undue burden is not a recipe for a long-term reliable car.
The EVs that will do 1 million miles without major work (at the very least not needing entire drive units) will come from "boring" companies with "boring" designs.
That's a heavy-duty diesel in a transit bus. Very different use-case, and 1M miles is not at all surprising there. For tractor-trailers and other heavy truck engines, a few million miles is a common lifetime.
I could point out how an ICE Bus vs an EV Taxi is not a dramatically different use-case, could point out how ridiculous it is acting like an M11 in a rust belt public transit bus hitting a million miles without an overhaul is "w/e"...
But I don't think your reply is meant to further the conversation, but rather to present a distraction: whether for self-satisfaction of stating the obvious or to divert the conversation from the actual point... why else would you just conveniently ignore the bulk of the comment?
> Of the vehicles that have been reported to the Plug In America Model S owner survey, 32% of the 2012 model year cars have had their drive unit replaced at least once, 27% of 2013's, and 18% of 2014's and so far none of the very few 2015's reported. As you can see, the older cars have higher numbers. Is that because Tesla has improved the newer cars or because the newer cars haven't been on the road long enough for them to see the issues yet? To answer that question, one has to analyze the data using methods from reliability engineering. That's what the folks a Green Car Reports did; see page two of their article for more details.
Recalls are one thing, imagine there are mass production sedans from the last decade where 32% of owners needed a new engine? We're not talking about a F1 cars here, run of the mill sedans.
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Oh yeah, and you get into gems like this, where they're having so many failures that now they won't replace parts that are functionally broken because they're not broken enough...
Imagine taking an ICE with a rod knock to the dealer and being told "that rod knock is not loud enough and you can still drive so we're going to let it go"
(For reference a dealer would take apart the engine and find what's wrong under warranty, Tesla will send you off until it fails I guess)
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Sorry if I come off as stand off-ish, it's just such a boringly plain conclusion that I can't believe it even has to be said in so many words.
The throwaway effect can an does happen to any ICE vehicle easily, when the engine is not economic to repair. We should have laws covering all types and brands of vehicles to make them more repairable, but ultimately this should be easier with electric (recycling batteries in bulk is cheaper than mining more lithium)